Ed King

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With gratitude to Fikso

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Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

—from Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

Far off, far down, some fisherman is watching As the rod dips and trembles over the water, Some shepherd rests his weight upon his crook, Some ploughman on the handles of the ploughshare, And all look up, in absolute amazement, At those air-borne above. They must be gods!

—from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 8, “Daedalus and Icarus”

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Prologue

From KingWatch, twelve days post-crash:

7:47 A.M. EST BREAKING NEWS: Ed King’s flight data recorder recovered.

No evidence of mechanical failure.

Aircraft altitude at apex of flight: 54,500 feet.

Aircraft flight ceiling (manufacturer’s recommended maximum elevation): 51,000 feet.

Comments? (20 words or less)

KingCrank: Might have guessed it: King flew too high. Rule out mechanical failure. This was pilot error. grizpilot: I’m a pilot and can tell you—there’s no defeating physics.

Must have believed he was God.

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pythiamist: What a coincidence. King goes down, queen disappears.

Where do you get pilot error? rudewakeup: Of course the conspiracy theorists tab queen as culprit.

Oldest story in the world. techtrappist: She’s dead, too. They’ve both been offed. By us or the Chinese. Take your pick. candydark: Queen survives. Even thrives. I say so in no uncertain terms. techtrappist—you’re wrong. She goes on. pythiamist: I agree w/ candydark. Queen told her pilot to cruise to Carlisle without her. Then disappeared. She had a plan. techtrappist: And what was that? Walk away from billions? Give me a break, pythiamist. She’s dead. candydark: You must be a male, techtrappist. I smell dead-wrong male certainty every time you hit your Send key.

FiNancy: Speaking of walking away from billions, wish I’d run, not walked, from their stock 12 days back!!!

KingCrank: Pythia’s toast.

FiNancy: I agree: history. shanghairoller: Deal with it, folks. Just deal with the facts. Pythia’s not coming back.

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1 The Affair with the Au Pair

In 1962, Walter Cousins made the biggest mistake of his life: he slept with the au pair for a month. She was an English exchange student named Diane Burroughs, and he was an actuary at Piersall-Crane, Inc., whose wife had suffered a nervous breakdown that summer. Diane had been in his house for less than a week—mothering his kids, cleaning, making meals—when he noticed a new word intruding on his assessment of her.

“Here I am,” thought Walter, “an actuary, a guy who weighs risk for a living, and now, because I’m infatuated with the wrong person—because I’m smitten by an eighteen-year-old—I’m using the word ‘fate.’ ” Diane had been peddled to Walter, by an office temp familiar with her current host family, as “a nice girl from the U.K. who needs work to extend her visa.” Walter, who at thirty-four had never left North America, thought “au pair” sounded pretentious—“You mean babysitter,” he told the temp. Immediately regretting his provincialism, he added, “I could also go with ‘nanny.’ ” The temp’s comeback was sharp. She was younger than he was, wore formidable boots, and had an air of immunity to an office flirt like Walter. “No, definitely, it’s ‘au pair,’ ” she said. “She’s here on a visa. She’s from out of the country. If you take her on, you become

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her host father, and you give her an allowance for whatever she does for you—child care or housework or whatever.”

“Au pair” it was, then. Walter took down the phone number, called Diane’s host mother, then spoke to the girl herself. In no position to be picky—he needed help yesterday—he hired Diane on the telephone.

“This is hard to explain,” he explained, “but my wife’s . . . hospitalized.”

Back came the sort of English inflections he couldn’t help but be charmed by. “In hospital,” she said. “I do hope it isn’t serious.”

“No,” he said, “but meanwhile there’s the kids. Four and three. Barry and Tina. Out of diapers, but still, they’re tricky to corral.”

“Then allow me just a smidgen of shameful self-promotion. What you need is an English au pair, sir, adept with a rodeo rope.”

“I think you mean lasso.”

“A lass with a lasso, then, for when they’re mucking about starkers.”

“That’s what I need. Something like that.”

“Well,” said Diane, “I’m your girl.”

This flagrantly forward use of language—neat, cunning phrases and breezy repartee—from the mouth of a high-school girl jockeying for work was new in his American ear. Diane sounded quick-witted and cheerfully combative—qualities he’d always found winning and attractive—as in her screed on the U.S. State Department and its byzantine visa requirements. “I’m still keen to go to college in America,” she told him, “but at the moment I’m furious with your Seattle passport office. They’re trying, actually, to throw me out.”

The next Sunday, with his kids complaining in the back seat of his Lincoln Premiere, Walter went to escort this girl from her host family’s large Victorian near Seward Park to his brick-veneered ranch house in Greenwood. He hoped Diane wouldn’t be too disappointed to discover she was moving down in the world, and as he parked on the cobbles fronting the Victorian, he imagined himself apologizing for having nothing to offer in the way of gilding or ambience. Seward Park, after all, dripped old money and featured lake views; Greenwood, by contrast, was dowdy and decrepit, with summer-arid grass patches and sagging gutters. Walter, of course, would have liked a better neighborhood, but his was a notoriously mid-wage profession, a fact he hadn’t reckoned with at Iowa State but was reckoning with now, too late. Not that it was bad at Piersall-Crane, where he held down a cubicle by a window. Walter took

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7 certain consolations there—in collegial hobnobbing, in crisply dressed women, and, not least, in the higher realms of actuarial science. That the predictive power of numbers on a large scale could be brought to bear on future events—for Walter, that was like an esoteric secret and, as he put it to himself, sort of mystical. Okay, it wasn’t art or philosophy, but it was still deep, which almost no one understood.

When he first saw her, the au pair struck him as nowhere close to legal. She looked like a child, unfinished, a sprout—no hairdo or makeup, no jewelry, unadorned—she looked like the younger sister of a girl he’d dated long ago, in high school. Her abraded leather suitcases, strapped and buckled, and riddled with tarnished rivets that looked shot from a machine gun—a matched set, though one was a junior version of the other—waited for Walter on the porch. Propped on the clasp of the larger one was a transistor radio with an ivory plastic strap and ivory knobs. Feeling like a porter—but also like a honeymooner—he hauled her overstuffed luggage to the Lincoln’s trunk while Diane, in dungarees, doled out last-minute hugs and delivered farewells in her disarming accent. “Lovely,” he heard her say. “Perfect.” Then he held the car door wide for her, and when she turned, brightly, to greet his kids in the back seat, he looked, surreptitiously, down the gap that opened between the rear waist of her dungarees and the nether regions of her back, at the shadow there, the practical white undies, and the reddish down along her tailbone.

It was so—you never knew; you couldn’t predict. Not even an actuary knew what would happen—there were broad trends, of course, which he could express in tables, but individual destinies were always nebulous. In Walter’s case, this meant his wife was out of the house while he, against the odds, on a fair summer morning, was collecting up this enticing piece of luck to install in the bedroom across the hall from his. How had this dangerous but fortuitous thing happened? What had he done to deserve this risk? With these questions and her underwear in mind, he chose, as his route, Lake Washington Boulevard; there might be an intangible benefit in such a sinuous and scenic drive. He also decided to take all three kids to the booming, newly opened Seattle World’s Fair, because there he could function like a grandee, bestowing cotton candy and other largesse, before introducing Diane to Greenwood. With this plan in mind, he motored past pleasure craft and horse chestnut trees while, on the pas-

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senger side, hands twined in her lap, Diane answered questions, ingratiated herself skillfully and easily with his offspring, and brought to his mind the pert and perfect Hayley Mills, that upbeat, full-lipped, earnest starlet who, on the cover of Life in a sailor outfit, had puckered, naughtily, for a kiss. In fact, as Diane chatted up his children in lilting tones but with a teasing irony that, over their heads, might be aimed at him, she was a drop-dead ringer for the sixteen-year-old Disney darling who’d been in newspapers and magazines lately for turning down the lead role in Lolita.

A morsel, a nymphet, in frilly socks and Keds, a junior-high date—the beach walk, for sodas—and at the kind of youthful sexual crest that even a four-year-old could sense. Sure enough, Barry, with a four-year-old’s primal yearning, leaned over the front seat and settled his head on his hands, like a cherub posed for a Christmas portrait, the better to bask in Diane’s nubile aura. Flicking two fingers against his bony shoulder, the object of his son’s newly stirred affections chirped, as if on cue, “I love your name, Barry, really I do. And ‘Tina,’ ” she added, “is so lovely.” After that, she shot Walter a look, and winked as though he, her new employer, were instead her intimate chauffeur.

“You truly have great names,” he tossed out.

“Tip-top, the best, brilliant.”

“Barry and Tina: it’s genius, it’s beautiful.”

Diane, and then Walter, laughed.

And she laughed an hour later—the same truncated notes, issued through her nose and throat—when, on the mammothly rising Space Wheel, they all rocked precariously in the apex tub, ninety feet above the mania of the fairgrounds. She laughed because, taking hold of the lap bar, he’d muscled them into rocking harder while Tina put up conflicted resistance (“Daddy!”) and Barry applied a grit-filled assist. “Beastly!” hissed Diane, pulling Tina toward her. “Never mind such recklessness, love—he’s only toying with your dear, precious life.”

“But Tina absolutely adores danger. Don’t you, ‘luv’?”

To this his daughter had a one-word reply, delivered while clutching the au pair’s stellar thighs: “Diane.”

On the fairgrounds, Walter followed Diane like a dog, so he could admire how she wore those dungarees. There were a lot of bare-armed dresses on the midway, and peppermint tops, and circus stripes, but nothing that could beat Diane in dungarees. Nothing could beat Diane’s

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9 tilting ponytail when she lifted her chin to pack in wads of cotton candy; nothing could beat her in the Fine Arts Pavilion with her lovely little hands at the small of her back, leaning toward a painting called Oedipus and the Sphinx. Barry stood beside her with his head on her hip, and Walter stood alongside with Tina in his arms. The odd and slightly uncomfortable thing was that Oedipus had been painted monumentally naked—two spears, points down, beside one foot—while the Sphinx, half in darkness, winged and severe, pointed her bare breasts, from startling close range, at his face. “Ace,” said Diane, examining it. “I must say I like that running fellow in the corner. He’s quite active—he fixes Oedipus to the canvas. It’s arresting, so to speak, wouldn’t you say?”

Walter nodded as if he knew what she was talking about, then set Tina down and crossed his arms, the better to brood on art.

“Look how he’s brushed in the shadows of the cave,” Diane said.

“Look how the sun plays in those rocks, lower left.”

Did he read her correctly? Was he getting her signals? Because it seemed to Walter she was skirting the obvious—the nudity two feet in front of their faces—so as to give them both a chance to linger. She seemed, at the moment—if he wasn’t mistaken—a prick tease of the precocious-teen brand. He was confident that the point she meant for him to take was, As long as neither of us mentions nudity, we can go on standing here, looking at pornography together.

“Personally, for me, it’s the blue sky,” he said. “That amazing blue sky in the background.”

Again her truncated laugh, as at an inside joke, which he was now laboring to solicit at every turn.

They went to examine the World of Tomorrow. The line for this exhibit was long and hot, but eventually they found themselves inside the Bubbleator with 150 other agitated fairgoers, ascending, as if inside a soap bubble, toward “The Threshold and the Threat.”“The Threshold and the Threat” had been highlighted in press reports as a thought-provoking and instructional tour-de-force—Walter thought that sounded good for the kids—and was billed in the fair’s extensive guide as “a 21-minute tour of the future.” Yet, after a half-minute of ominously slow rising to a soundtrack called—Walter knew this from the guide—“Man in Space with Sounds,” the Bubbleator arrived not in the future but underneath a strangely lit semblance of the night sky. Stars and planets were projected

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onto distorted cubes, or onto something like magnified cells in a beehive.

What was this, anyway? Why had they been lifted to this surreal destination? Tina clung anxiously to his pant leg, and Barry looked frightened and aghast. In contrast, the new au pair only stretched her back, pointing her girlish breasts at the faux heavens. Then she dropped them, and joined him and the kids as they huddled together like an abducted family in the bowels of a B-movie spaceship. Everyone had to endure more “Man in Space with Sounds”—alarms, theremin wails, inharmonious strings and brass, much of it familiar to Walter as the sort of thing that backed Vincent Price—until, cast in celluloid on the weirdly curving cubes, a frightened family crouched in a fallout shelter. This was too much for Tina, who covered her eyes. Walter wondered who at the World’s Fair had given the green light to “The Threshold and the Threat,” because, whatever else it was—besides some pointy-headed goofball’s dark view of the future—it was also, in his view, wrong. Subliminal, demonic, scarring, you name it, but best summed up as wrong. “We should have been told before we got in line,” he thought angrily. “Somebody should have warned us.”

And now, on the cubes, came one image atop another, kaleidoscopic, fleeting, discombobulating, dissociative—jetports, monorails, the Acropolis, a mushroom cloud—before, again, that pathetic cellared family, this time with JFK exhorting them, and all other Americans, in his Bostonbrahmin brogue, to build a brighter world through technology.

The hallucinatory journey through apocalypse ended, and Diane said only, “That was fab.”

“That was a nightmare,” countered Walter. “Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, he felt reassured by the real world, and so, clearly, did his kids. They all breathed happily the June carnival air, pregnant as it was with cooking grease and promise. In the Food Pavilion, it was Orange Juliuses all around—the kids and Diane sucking away at jointed double straws while he, having bolted his Extra Large, ate a corn dog. Just let it happen, he told himself when Tina implored him for a Belgian waffle— be carefree and magnanimous, stay with the pointed humor (“How about the Girls of the Galaxy exhibit?”), and tease them all often, with easy tenderness. There were solid points to be earned, he felt sure, by riding the fine line between paternalism and friendship, between daddy and a nice guy with cash.

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11 “Girls of the Galaxy?” Diane asked.

“According to the fair guide, they pose naked for Polaroids.”

“Including Earth girls?”

“Especially Earth girls.”

“That wouldn’t do in England. Not at all.”

Walter shrugged as if Girls of the Galaxy was just old hat in his world.

“My, what do you call it, bonny lass,” he said, “you’re not in England anymore.”

Diane separated her lips from her straws. “Bonny’s Scottish,” she said, looking into her drink. “In England, you might try stunning.”

“Stunning, then.”

“Or comely would do—I would accept that.”

They moved along until the kids got tired. It was time to go home, but, because he wanted to—it was the only thing he was really interested in at the fair—they visited the World of Science building and its Probability Exhibit. Here, in a glass box, thousands of pennies dropped mechanically down a chute and were shunted thereafter past equidistant dividers so as to demonstrate the inexorability of a bell curve. As the coins fell in essential randomness, they inevitably built up a standard normal distribution (“A Gaussian distribution,” he told the kids and Diane), which never varied and was a fixed law of nature; the pennies made a perfectly symmetrical hill, the formation of which could be relied on. He admired this so much he got effusive about it and explained, to Diane, what a bell curve was, and in language he hoped didn’t sound too actuarial delineated the “central limit theorem” associated with what they were witnessing. “Put it this way,” he said, moving closer to her. “The sum of variables at work among those pennies follows a unique attractor distribution.”

“How interesting,” she shot back, mirthful at his expense, and mimicking his enthusiasm while flipping her ponytail absentmindedly. “An attractor distribution.”

They were now six hours into their relationship, and already it was more than he could take.

Walter had needed no more than a year of marriage to get to where he’d felt the odds were decent that he could predict what his wife, Lydia, would say. When the McGuire Sisters were on Ed Sullivan: “Phyllis has

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gained weight”; when he asked what she needed from the A&P: “Nothing”; when he kissed her in the bathroom: “I have to get dressed now”; when he said “Good night”: “I hope so.” Walter was pretty certain he could see inside her brain, so he was caught off guard one Monday morning when he was unable to rouse Lydia. It unfolded that she needed hospitalization following an overdose of prescription sleeping pills he hadn’t even known she’d been taking. A psychiatrist said she must now have complete rest from household responsibilities and duties.

It shocked Walter to see Lydia in a hospital gown, haggard, without makeup, without stockings, bereft of dignity, but there was nothing to be done about it, or at least nothing he could do. She was in the hands of head doctors at this stage, who put her, he thought, through strange paces. She scribbled pictures, modeled with clay, attended daily “group sessions,” and played shuffleboard. On his visits to the ward, Walter felt out of her loop, estranged not just by virtue of her mental illness but by virtue of her therapy. He went daily, and always found her the same— drugged and incapable of speaking intimately or of explaining her problems to him. She wasn’t a zombie, but she wasn’t there, either, and he couldn’t figure out how to act around her or what her illness portended.

Nor could he trace her demise backward in time to how, and why, it had happened. Out of nowhere she’d simply gone off the deep end—Lydia, who’d long been steady and forthright; Lydia, who’d taken him into her arms in the middle of the three and a half Chicago years he’d enjoyed after Iowa State. He’d thought of her, in that era, as a poor man’s Sabrina—Sabrina if half Norwegian, Midwestern, and plain-speaking— because she looked so much like the sensationally built British pinup who’d consorted with Fidel Castro. He’d married her eagerly. Then she got pregnant, and her cheesecake magnetism evaporated, never to return. Since Barry’s birth, she’d struggled with weight gain in a way that drove both of them to the brink. Lydia was always riding the diet rollercoaster, up and down, up and down, which would have been all right with Walter if she didn’t have to talk about it so much. He felt bad about his irritation when she brought up calories, but she’d become obsessed to the point of having no subject other than food. So what if she was too broad in the beam to make it as a calendar girl—was that any reason to starve yourself? After all, he’d gained weight, too, but was he going crazy about it? Didn’t she know that he loved her despite her weight problem?

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13 On she went, looking sadly in the mirror, counting calories, and buying new clothes. Lydia was so concerned about the heft of her behind, its geometry and sag, its silhouette in skirts and pants, that sometimes, in the wee hours, she jarred him from dreams because she was performing “clenches” in bed and the box spring was quaking under him from the stress of her exertions. The first time this happened he’d teased her about it, but before too long, it was troubling.

Now she was in a mental hospital, which he should have seen on the horizon. She’d been worn down by domesticity, by multiple sinks, kids, shopping lists, and dirty underwear in the hamper. That was Walter’s theory, anyway. He thought that Lydia was resisting domesticity after four years of French with a minor in history, and two more as a goodlooking single woman in Chicago with friends, dates, a downtown job, and a series—probably—of boyfriends. That made sense. After all, there were girls he missed and longed for. There were days when he didn’t want to be who he was or do what he was doing, at home or at the office. So who could blame Lydia for going off the deep end? He himself could go off the deep end. For now, though, the main thing was, Lydia’s illness was an all-out crisis. Lydia had left him juggling all the pins. It wasn’t her fault, but the pins were in the air, and Walter only had two hands.

And that made the au pair, Diane Burroughs, a godsend. At just the right moment this dazzling girl, brimming with pluck and perpetual good humor, domestically energetic, chipper, and playful, had landed on Walter’s doorstep. What a miracle! Here was this pretty young Brit in an apron, fixing wholesome meals, making up beds, and ironing, with charm, while listening to banal pop music. Walter didn’t really know anything about her, but he wanted to know everything, right away. It was like his crushes in junior high—he felt a stomach-churning need to make onthe-prowl headway despite overwhelming trepidation. And so, when it seemed safe, he snooped among her things, starting in the bathroom she shared with the kids, where he pondered, alongside Lustre-Creme Shampoo and Junior Pursette tampons, a jar of coconut oil. He wondered about this oil, and how and why she used it. He wondered if Diane liked to—how did the English put it?—diddle. Was that their term?

One thing he did know was that Diane liked television. Nightly, when the kids were under their laundered sheets, tucked in with teddy bears, read to, and asleep, Diane made her way to the living room to watch, for

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example, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. When he called home at fourthirty, she would cheerfully tell him that she and the kids were watching American Bandstand. On Saturday mornings, wearing cotton PJs, she cuddled with Barry and Tina in front of The Alvin Show and Top Cat. Could you blame her for any of this? Did it make her less attractive? No, you couldn’t blame Diane—she didn’t lend herself to blame. Blame wouldn’t attach to her peerless young body. Walter tried to roll his eyes at her and feel superior, but that was no use, because he didn’t feel superior—he felt older, yes, but not superior. At the end of week one, after giving it careful thought, he paid Diane her right and proper tribute: a sizable cash bonus with a note confessing, “I feel lucky, Diane. You’re worth it.”

Sometimes, in the late evening, he listened hopefully—and pathetically—for the pad of her slim, slippered feet in the hallway, louder as she emerged from the children’s bathroom and headed in his direction.

Always, at the last, she turned left instead of right, shut the door behind her with a thoughtfully quiet click, and made the muffled, unextraordinary noises that went with arranging herself for sleep. At that point he liked both to listen and to imagine, conjuring scenarios involving coconut oil and Diane Burroughs in . . . a pink chiffon baby-doll with spaghetti straps? No. Her innocent white cotton underwear? Yes. If her box spring made the slightest noise, he ran with that and felt his heart jump a little—maybe she’d finally surrendered to desire. . . maybe, in a moment . . . But he knew this was ridiculous. Besides, he couldn’t sleep with all this yearning, with the guilt and fantasizing and the laughing at himself. “I’m a fool,” he thought, “thirty-four and a fool. The truth is, I’m lying here in a T-shirt and boxers, pining for a girl who watches cartoons and sings along to the Billboard Top 40.”

When Diane took the kids to a park one Sunday, he looked around, delicately, in her bedroom. On the desk was a letter she’d written on ruled school paper: “Dear Club,” it began, followed by “Hey cheeky Jimmie take a puff for the au pair. On the up side I’ve had a trip to the World’s Fair.” Walter skimmed ahead to ferret out “Club,” which he took to be one of those silly English nicknames, in this case probably for a buck-toothed beau whose real name was Rupert or Lionel or Percy. Farther along, though, after evaluating evidence like “In answer to your question, I haven’t kept in touch with John or Mum, or with anyone in Essex, for

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15 that matter,” he surmised that Club was Diane’s brother. And that was good, because a brother was no impediment to his chances.

Even though no one was in the house, Walter found himself being very quiet as he opened Diane’s drawers. There were high-waisted panties and white camisoles, but what he liked best, and lingered over, was the mocha bathing suit with the long back zipper, a bust of tulip petals, a modesty panel draping its crotch, and leg openings in the style of a boy’s briefs. Walter sniffed it—chlorine—and fondled its hook-andeye closures. He pressed on the plastic bone between the cups, ran his fingers along the perforated lining, and caressed the metal slides of the shoulder straps before, in a pique of shame, arranging the bathing suit to approximate how he’d found it. After pausing to steal a look in the closet, he admonished himself and fled.

On the last Friday in June, Walter took the kids and Diane (with the blessing of Lydia’s therapist, who assured Walter that there was no reason not to do it) for a three-day weekend on San Juan Island, where he owned a cabin with a sagging roof that was admittedly a money pit and a burden. Between the southern exposure and the steady sea wind, there was no way to keep up with the leaks, stave the drafts, or preserve the rotting windows that, in the best scenario, would be painted with a heavy preservative annually. This was not to mention the weeds between the pavers, the sluggish septic system, the well needing deeper excavation, the failing foundation, and the potholed drive. From the moment they bought the place, Lydia had encouraged Walter to think of its rusticity as charming and to let go of his urge to make it perfect, but he viewed a day not spent on chores as a day hastening the demise of their investment. There was no way he could let the place disintegrate, and as a result, only some of his island time was spent in a deck chair with a beer; otherwise, it was trips to the hardware store and unending, halfhearted puttering. This weekend, though, there was the stimulating consolation of Diane in her mocha bathing suit, cavorting with his kids on the beach.

On Saturday afternoon, Diane helped him paint the picket fence and pulled weeds out of Lydia’s perennial beds. Lydia wasn’t much of a gardener; every spring she planted a box of bulbs that by June lay under a morass. Diane took care of that cheerfully, wearing jeans she’d scissored into shorts, a baby-blue T-shirt printed dewey weber surfboards, and Keds without socks. At five, she disappeared into the bathroom, to

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emerge eventually with her hair combed wet, in a plaid sundress, barefoot. Walter, in the striped polo he reserved for painting, unshaved, sunburned, and smoking a cheap cigar—a look he could only hope had a manly summer charm—watched her from his post at the barbecue while she leaned on the porch railing and gazed at the water. “I ought to shave and change,” he thought.

He did. At nine-thirty, Diane put the kids to sleep in the cabin’s single bedroom. The plan was for her to bunk with Tina in the musty, soft queen-size bed that was Lydia’s before he married her; Barry would sleep beside them on a narrow camp cot. Walter was to repair to the sleeping loft, with its spiderwebs, heat, and nocturnally active houseflies, but since this prospect had no appeal, he settled on the couch instead, his feet up and a beer beside him, to read The Sand Pebbles.

Then, around ten, Diane slipped out of the bedroom. Her hair, he noticed, was a little awry, probably from pressing against a pillow. She still wore the plaid dress, now wrinkled across the thighs. Without asking his permission, she went to the front door and propped it open with one of Barry’s rubber beach boots. “Warm in here,” she explained.

“Fortunately, we don’t have mosquitoes,” he replied.

“I’ll shut it again if you want me to—do you? Whatever you want. It’s your cottage.”

He put down his book and said, “Diane, come on, now, it’s not what I want, it’s what you want. If it’s the night air you want, then, by all means, let’s have the door open wide.”

Diane smiled and raised her eyebrows suggestively. “What I want? Is it, really? In that case, let’s play a game.”

Walter swung his feet to the floor and, taking up his beer, feigned confidence. “Which game is that?” he asked.

“Life,” said Diane, pointing toward the cabin’s shelf of tattered board games. “That’s one I know how to play.”

Together, they set up Life on the kitchen table. She accepted his offer of a bottle of Dr Pepper and, when he told her to pick first, selected the red car; he took the green. Off they went, following the track past mountains, trees, and buildings until, at the first junction, Diane chose the College route. In the name of competition, he teased her by saying, “College isn’t automatically or always the right path. It might seem like it is, but let me tell you, it isn’t.”

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17 “How would you know?”

“I’m older than you.”

“How old exactly?”

“Old enough to know you shouldn’t go to college without giving it some thought.”

“Well,” said Diane, and spun the wheel, “I’ve done that already. The thinking.”

“That’s fine,” replied Walter, “but look where you’ve landed. I’m afraid I’m going to have to go with my Collect card and take half your windfall.

Pay up.”

Diane wagged a finger at him. “Keep your hair on,” she said. “I’ve got an Exemption card I haven’t played yet.”

He bought insurance, she bought none, and eventually, his long-term approach proved superior. But just when he thought he had her on the ropes, Diane landed on the Lucky Day square. With twenty thousand dollars newly in hand, she opted for the game’s penultimate gamble: lose all of it or, in one spin of the wheel, turn it into the lead-seizing sum of three hundred thousand. “Don’t do it,” he warned. “The odds are four to one against you.”

“Just get the number strip,” she answered.

When she’d lost the twenty thousand, she took a pull from her Dr Pepper and said, “Your turn, Walter. At least I tried.”

Had she called him Walter before? “Walter” was a good sign. “Walter” meant he was getting somewhere. Yes, there was a definite warming trend. “You did try,” he said. “And now you’re broke.”

Eventually, he retired as a Millionaire, and Diane, behind, risked it all on one spin, hoping to vault past him and become a Tycoon. Instead, she finished Bankrupt, then plucked up her car in a feisty capitulation. “Congratulations,” he said. “Another round?”

“No,” she answered. “You only get one go at Life. I went to college, got married, got a job, had kids, bought a house, bought a car, bought two cars—what more could I want?”

Was this code for ridicule? A condemnation of his choices? “Great,” said Walter. “Now, not at all meaning to lead you astray—but could I offer you more than just a soft drink?”

“I’ll have what you’re having. A pint.”

“You mean a beer.”

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“If you want to call that a beer, yes, thank you—I’ll have an American beer, please, served from an American can.”

He got her a beer. They went outside and sat on the stoop, where they listened to waves degrade the beach and gazed at the Big Dipper. Walter admired how Diane brought her knees together to prevent stray glimpses of her panties. What great legs she had, he observed, with just the right girlish taper. “You knock a beer back fast,” he said. “I bet you had a good senior year.”

“Absolutely. Tip-top, Walter.”

“You went on dates, went to parties, ran around.”

“I partook, yes. Indulged, shall we say. I enjoyed my year as an exchange student.”

Walter—feeling like a teen-age boy again, one with the utterly transparent intention of getting his cute date drunk—went in for what remained of the half-case he’d bought that afternoon in Friday Harbor.

“Partook,” he thought. “Indulged. Enjoyed. This girl’s talking about sex.”

When he came back, Diane said, “Stars like this remind me of home. I used to look up at the stars quite a lot, for lack of better things to do.”

“You’re a romantic, Diane, so try this out: look at that moonlight, glinting on the sea.”

She did that. Then she leaned on her turned-back palms with a tilted head so as to look at the sky more comfortably. Walter almost said, “Can I kiss you, Diane?” but opted instead for, “You’re clever for your age.

Incredibly mature. For someone just done with high school.”

“Here,” she said. “But at home I’m below average.”

“I’m sure that’s not so.”

“Flattery gets you nowhere.”

Walter shrugged like somebody defeated. “Changing the subject, then,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you overwhelmed our State Department yet with your vast English charm? Because, if not, maybe I could help you with it.”

She hadn’t overwhelmed the State Department yet. “Though I’m still working on it,” she assured him. “But, please, don’t let’s talk about it.”

“You’re on a little vacation up here. You don’t want to think about the real world, do you. Well, then, long live the Queen, or whatever you people say. Drink up.”

And she did drink up, with her fair throat bobbing. He offered her another right away.

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19 “Declined,” said Diane. “Not tonight—no.” She grinned, rose, crossed her legs, and pressed her thighs. “Walter,” she said. “Walt. Wally. I need to run a bit quickly to the toilet. Excuse me, then. I’m off.”

Walter considered the meaning of “Wally” while listening to his au pair pee forcefully. Then she emerged, took their beer cans to the sink, and, under the kitchen lights, bent at the waist to pick up a dish towel that had gotten shoved under the toe kick. The thick, falling hair, the tanned legs, the nimble hands, the shadow of her junior bra beneath her plaid dress: a familiar panic from his pre-married years began churning in Walter’s brain and chest. “Maybe,” he thought, “the ball’s in my court and she’s waiting for me to take a shot at her—or maybe, if I do that, she’ll scream.” However he looked at it, one thing was plain—this little chick had him gripped by the balls. “Fun game,” said Diane. “Good night.”

Later, irritated by flies trapped against the ceiling in the loft, he jerked off while generating a mental slide show of Diane, in her underwear, meeting his needs.

The flirtation and seduction that played out in the coming days, both on San Juan Island and back home, in Greenwood, were built from the usual and inevitable ingredients: double entendres, verbal sparring, electrifying unease, fearful agitation, bated breath, and, finally, desperation before the inevitable plunge over the waterfall.

The kind of trouble that there was no going back from started before midnight on the Fourth of July, when Walter awoke to find Diane on his bed in light cotton pajamas printed with fire engines. “What is it?” he said, sitting up on one elbow. “What’s the problem, Diane?”

“Oh, Walter,” she answered, pleadingly.

He hesitated. “Bad timing,” he thought, because he’d eaten two burgers and a lot of macaroni salad around eight, then worked his way through nearly a half-case of Pabst while Diane, in her scissored-off jeans, lit sparklers and Snakes for the kids in the back yard. In other words, he felt sluggish, not in optimal form, and too bloated for what might be about to happen. In the bed he shared with Lydia. Beneath portraits of Tina and Barry on the wall. Where either of them might come padding in, wakened by fireworks, scared, seeking solace. And, finally, with a girl who claimed to be eighteen but who might be, by the look of it, considerably younger. “What’s the deal?” he said.

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“Can I get in?” Diane asked.

She lifted his sheet, rolled onto the mattress, and tucked herself, urgently, against his side, as though she were his daughter and he was about to read a story. Walter, who wore only his boxer shorts, said, “Whoa-ho-ho, wait a second.”

“Please,” Diane answered. “I’m lonely.”

She snuggled in farther. There was a big portable fan on in the room, and the window was open, but it was still hot. Already, between them, a film of sweat was forming. But that wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was that Diane was making a strange noise now, a cross between a whimper and a shriek. Was that crying? Yes, it was crying. Not knowing what to do or say, Walter said, “Hey, come on, now, Diane,” and patted her shoulder.

Diane blubbered, sniffled, and honked while twisting a lock of hair around her index finger and giving him—maybe not unwittingly—a boner. Yet, despite his dick’s insistence on a selfish response, there was no way for Walter not to feel sorry for Diane, even tender, like a father. Until now she’d seemed so resilient and unsinkable. What was she crying about? He wasn’t ready for crying. “Diane,” he said, and stroked her hair once. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” she answered.

Then she let forth with personal information she seemed desperate to divulge. She was fifteen, she was “the daughter of the town whore,” she was “never, ever going back to England,” she’d lied to the State Department, her school year had been a social disaster, and nothing had gone right with her Seward Park host family, particularly with her host father, who’d ignored her. “How could that be?” asked Walter.

“He didn’t like me, I know he didn’t.”

“That’s impossible. He must be nuts.”

Then she said that her own father was French or an American sailor—she didn’t know which. She had a half-brother, Caleb, older by sixteen months (“So I was right,” thought Walter, “about the letter on her desk—her half-brother Caleb is this ‘Club’ she writes home to”), who’d run off when he was fourteen to London, and another half-brother, John, older still, who was a constable. She had a grandmother in the countryside who, Diane said, was “a terrible witch,” and a grandfather who’d called her “a bastard miscreant from a litter of bastard miscreants.”

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2 1 She described for Walter a scene from her childhood. She was twelve, it was summer, she was in the countryside, slopping pigs, and her grandmother said, when Diane asked who her father was, “Only the Lord and your mum know.” Her grandfather added, “Before you was hatched she was consorting with a sailor.” Vivid recall made Diane sob all the harder.

She even remembered that, later, in the house, her tormentors had gone on pitching it about: “Dallying with a Frenchman at the time, wasn’t she?” and “That sailor was a merchant-marine man and a sot.”“That sort of talk,” Diane told Walter, to which he replied, “That wasn’t nice. That was just plain inconsiderate.”

Next complaints about her “mum” tumbled out—her mum who’d once made a shameful few quid servicing the needs of any and all comers, and a few more dusting and scrubbing genteel homes. But her mum couldn’t keep clients in either category, and went on the dole, and shut herself in, the better to monitor the phone and the neighbors. Thereafter, when forced to go out, she painted herself with a horrifying rough, and though she limped from sciatica, straightened up in the presence of men as though they still represented opportunity. They didn’t any longer, and it was Diane’s job to listen to her mum rant about it, and to agree with her about everything but especially about her remaining attractions, and to clean out her ashtrays and kitchen pots and toilet, and sleep on the sofa when the rooms were let to boarders, until, feeling taken for granted, she left.

“Diane, you’re not taken for granted here,” said Walter. “I would never take you for granted.”

With this, she kissed his cheek, he thought in gratitude. Walter felt that the next move was his, but he was worried about his breath because of the macaroni salad. For this reason he hesitated, wondering how bad it was, and in that moment, with force and suddenness, Diane climbed on top of him. “Jesus,” he said.

“Oh, Walter.”

It was a little bit hard to get past the fire engines on her PJs—past the idea that he was in bed with a fifteen-year-old—but Walter got past them soon enough. The PJs came off—he made sure of that—the top first, and then the bottoms. His au pair, naked, was so sleek and untarnished, so gleamingly pubescent, and so unlike Lydia after two babies, that even as he flipped her onto her back, even while he asked her, twice, if she was

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sure, he knew, glumly, that he was doing the wrong thing. There was a name for this, statutory rape, which, he had to admit, excited him. He had moral qualms, but he ignored them.

Did she have moral qualms? She cried a lot while he went at her, but didn’t resist or make him stop. Walter pressed on, determined to incite participation, to goad from Diane some clenching and clutching, some shortness of breath, any signal of his prowess or good technique, but somehow, at the end, she still seemed miserable, and the worst of it was her almost imperceptible orgasm, during which she squeezed her eyes shut. She fluttered under him, with effort, like a wounded bird, and immediately afterward, or before she was done, sobbed again in childlike catches, smelling of her tears and his spunk. “Diane,” he said, “are you okay?”

“Oh, Walter.”

To his surprise, she didn’t say another word, and before long began to snore intermittently in an ascending nasal hum. He listened to that for fifteen minutes, running a hand along her back and flanks and admiring their youthful smoothness. Then, fearing that one of his kids might stumble in, he woke Diane and asked her to go back across the hall to her bedroom.

“Ask nicely, Walter.”

“Okay,” he said. “I don’t want you to go, Diane. But for the sake of the kids, please, I think it’s time.”

She got on her PJs and exited. A bit later, he heard the morning paper land on his porch, and got up to read it. The French were tossing in the towel in Algeria, JFK was pussyfooting with the Russians. He found he couldn’t concentrate on any of this, because he kept wondering if what had happened was a train wreck. “Of course,” he thought, “it’s a major train wreck. I better nip this in the bud and get a hold of myself.”

But he didn’t get a hold of himself, for a whole thrilling month, until the day his wife was discharged from the hospital.

Walter collected Lydia on the first Saturday in August. She kissed him in the doorway of her room on the ward—with a guilt-expanding, marital ardor—and he took in the view of the fine down on her forearms. Her hair was done up loftily—stacked high by an in-hospital dresser—and

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23 she’d put on, for her return home, a newly ironed floral shift and scarlet pumps. Lydia paused at the threshold of the hospital to say, “I never want to come back to this hellhole,” took Walter’s hand, and again kissed him.

She kissed him a third time beside the Lincoln, and told him how wonderful it felt to be rested and to have lost ten long-resistant pounds. She wanted her life back, she said. She sounded hopeful. Walter said he wanted that for her, too, then asked her to explain what her illness had been about. What did the shrinks say? What was behind it? Lydia told him that it was very complex and without an easy, all-purpose explanation. It went back to her childhood, he gathered she was saying. Her mother had been beautiful and slim. Her father, a small-town accountant, had been distant. The main thing was, she felt better now.

Walter brought Lydia’s suitcase into the house, while Lydia brought a regal calm. The kids greeted her with no less affection than if there’d never been a Diane Burroughs. Lydia got down on the floor with them right away, the better to deploy her newfound serenity, and so did Walter, miserably. Diane turned out to be a consummate actress, and introduced herself to Lydia wearing culottes, an apron, and pigtails she flipped to entertain the kids while extolling the “tasteful, modern decorating scheme” in the Cousins home and the “marvelously quiet” electric dishwasher. That was the full extent of her welcome. She kept aloof from the rest of the family reunion, as if to exercise English serving-class discretion. Then it was time to eat what she’d prepared—a summertime salad of cold poached chicken breasts laid on spinach leaves, with mandarin oranges and almond slivers. The kids had mostly Tater Tots, and, for dessert, a Duncan Hines chocolate cake that Lydia declined, claiming fresh resolve. Diane told Lydia she looked beautiful.

After dinner, Walter and Lydia sat in the back yard while Diane did the dishes and watched the kids. There was some talk about flowerbeds, about changing things, about a birdbath and pavers and less weeding.

Walter felt half present for this dialogue, preoccupied, as he was, with marital angst. What to do? What came next? What was his future with Diane? He tried focusing on Lydia, who looked good on the patio—in fact, with her post-institutionalized, preternatural calm, and minus ten pounds, she looked better, in his eyes, than she had for a long time, and not at all furrowed, desultory, or anxious. Walter knew she hadn’t “done it” for a month, which meant doing it with her tonight should be better

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than it normally was. Unfortunately, he was beset by morose feelings that he knew would detract.

When he thought he could do so without giving Lydia the impression that he was abandoning her on the night of her return to the family circle, he said, “I’ll go check on the kids.”

“Good,” answered Lydia. “I’ll take a shower.”

Walter retreated. Being out of Lydia’s presence was a reprieve—he didn’t have to hold his face to a false expression, and he could anguish without worrying how it looked. At Diane’s bedroom door, he gave a warning knock, then opened it and said, “Kids! It’s time to calm down now and brush your teeth.”

It took a while, but Barry and Tina finally went—right after he’d told them to, with severity at last, for the fourth time. Walter shut Diane’s bedroom door behind them, stood against it, and said—to a teen-ager in culottes—“What now?”

“We’ll find out, won’t we.”

“What do you want?”

“Plenty of things.”

“What does that mean?” asked Walter.

He pinched her chin between his fingers, the better to admire her face before moving in to kiss her, but Diane pushed his hand off and stepped back. “Don’t do that,” she said. “Not now.”

“Okay,” said Walter. “I understand.”

It didn’t at all surprise him, forty minutes later, to find that he had trouble in the sexual department with the freshly washed, scented, and slightly damp Lydia. Under him she felt urgent for renewed affections of a sort that at the moment he was incapable of providing. After much effort, he softly snaked into her, where he found himself wallowing not in pleasure but in guilt. Lydia’s familiarity and recent mental illness guided him into a sea of self-loathing, where he shrank to almost nothing, apologized profusely, felt grateful for his wife’s reassurances, and finally did what he always did when, failing to get started or show self-control, he still felt a need to be a source of satisfaction. Walter became earnest with his hands.

The question developed, by Lydia’s third day back, as to the future status of the au pair. Did they need her anymore? What was her role? Was Lydia now ready to resume her tasks as housekeeper, laundress, cook,

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2 5 mom? Was it prudent for her to plunge in right away—into everything that had driven her, recently, to exhaustion? Was it fair to the au pair to dismiss her without warning, or was it better to make a gradual transition, in which case Diane should stay on in the guest room as an ancillary figure, a mother’s helper? Could they justify the continued expense?

About Diane’s status—should she stay or go?—Walter thought it best to defer. “Don’t argue it either way,” he decided. “Leave it to Lydia.” But Lydia insisted on his active participation, and coaxed him to express himself, until he felt forced to say what he knew he had to say, but didn’t want to say, since there was no right answer—that it was time for Diane Burroughs to exit.

Together, they broke the news to Diane, explaining the simple, unsurprising truth that, with Lydia’s return, they didn’t need an au pair. Diane took this in stride, which hurt Walter’s feelings, assuring the Cousinses cheerfully that of course it made sense—“Mum’s home, so absolutely. My job’s done.” Lydia hugged Diane, told her how grateful she was for her “extraordinary and wonderful way with the children,” praised her for everything she’d done for her family, and assured Diane that Diane needn’t leave until she’d made arrangements for, as Lydia put it, “the next exciting phase of your young life.” Through all of this, they were in each other’s arms, patting, rubbing, and massaging each other’s backs, with Diane grinning at Walter over Lydia’s shoulder in a way surely meant to mock his wife, then forming her lips into the shape of a kiss before showing Walter the slick tip of her tongue, all of which childish display he endured with a bitter censure and regret. Then Diane said to Lydia, embracing her harder and staring Walter down, “For me, being the au pair in your home has been deliriously exciting. But you’re right, Mrs. Cousins. I’m looking forward to whatever happens next.”

What happened next came later that summer, after Walter had consigned Diane to the consolatory vault of sexual imagery he employed while doing it with Lydia. She called one morning at his office to say, “Are you ready for this? I’m pregnant.”

Walter sat up straight in his cubicle. He was in the throes of a loss-cost calculation for a savings-and-loan under time-sensitive duress, and felt driven to get numbers out the door, but forget that now: Diane was preg-

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nant. Pregnant and, he had to assume, fingering him as the father—but was he? Couldn’t it be some other fool? Walter looked over his dividing walls to see who might be in hearing distance. Next door, to his left, was Duane Keene, chewing on a stem of his glasses; to his right was Rick Lubovich, with his hangdog shoulders, as usual doing little more than rubbing his head while pondering his IBM Selectric. Since they could both overhear him, Walter said, in a normal voice, “Okay, I’m listening to you.”

“Well, what are we going to do, Walter?”

“That’s going to take some discussion,” he said. “Do you think we can set up an appointment?”

“This is so horrid,” Diane replied. “I never wanted to be like Mum. Now look at what’s become of me.” He heard sniffles.

Walter said, “I absolutely understand. My calendar’s open in front of me right now. I could meet you, really, any time.”

“Why is this happening?” Diane asked.

“I’d like to help you to address that if I can. So let’s get together and talk,” said Walter. “I hear what you’re saying—it’s urgent for you, and I want you to know that I’m available with regard to it—in fact, I’m at your disposal.”

“Oh, Walter,” said Diane. “What will happen to me?”

That evening, he picked her up at the house in Laurelhurst where Diane was now installed as au pair. It was a night in mid-August when fall was discernible as a faint, crisp chill just after sundown. Diane was out front, arms crossed impatiently, wearing dungarees and a man’s white dress shirt with its sleeves rolled. She didn’t look well groomed. She hadn’t primped to see him. She looked like she’d come from the kitchen sink, and probably had. She got in quickly and said, “Go,” as if the Lincoln was an escape car, then watched the side mirror as Walter sped off.

They left Laurelhurst behind. Walter chauffeured her along residential streets, going nowhere and—between long silences—speaking to the matter at hand. “I’m sure,” he said, “that I could arrange for an abortion.

If you want to consider that, I would love to discuss it with you. And the first thing you should know is that I would take care of everything, and pay for everything, and go with you, and take you home afterward. I’d be there with you throughout the whole business. You don’t have to worry about that.”

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27 Diane rode with her head against the window. She looked—how did she look? Like he’d been stupid about rubbers? Like he was a total idiot? Like he disgusted her? It was impossible to know what Diane was thinking—he’d felt this way about her from the moment they’d met— because she was fifteen and foreign. “That all sounds great,” she said, “but I could never, ever do it. I’m not going to have an abortion.”

“I don’t know,” Walter replied quickly. “We shouldn’t take options off the table.”

Their silences grew longer as they rode past evening lawn sprinklers, dog walkers, and a few kids on bikes, asking, in different ways, again and again, “Now what?” Finally, though, Walter got Diane to agree to a plan— a far-from-foolproof plan, unwieldy and laborious, but the best he could come up with under the circumstances—which they put into motion in the middle of November, when Diane told her au-pair family that she was going home to England. A week before Christmas, her host mother and father dropped her at Sea-Tac Airport. She lugged her suitcases into the terminal, rode down the escalator to the baggage-claim level, then went back outside to meet Walter, who was waiting in his car. Yes, he felt oppressed by Diane’s pregnancy, and fearful of how things might turn out, but he also felt steeled and ready at this point. He’d told Lydia—who was back to normal, well organized, and on the ball—that he was “going to Houston for a conference.” She’d answered, good-naturedly, “That’s what they all say,” and he’d chuckled as if to acknowledge the truth of this. Then, feeling tender, and despising himself, he’d hugged her and insisted that he didn’t want to go to Houston, which, if you construed it the right way, was a fact.

Now he and his knocked-up fifteen-year-old former au pair drove eighty miles north to Anacortes. Walter brooded at the ferry slip where they were going to embark for San Juan Island while Diane slumped, gray-faced, against the window. In a battering sea wind they drove onto the boat and ended up between a trailered backhoe and a wrecking van.

Diane wanted to stay in the Lincoln, as opposed to sitting in the warm cabin up top, so Walter put a blanket over her legs and, self-consciously solicitous, another around her shoulders. The ferry churned into disagreeable seas, which became forbidding in Rosario Pass, eliciting, in Walter, fear of a roll. He said, “I’m sorry the crossing’s so rough,” and Diane answered, “Come off it, Walter. You sound pathetic.” Then they

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disgorged onto broken tarmac and drove deserted roads to the cabin at Cattle Point, where Walter installed his soured teen lover, put a wad of cash in her hand, and started dinner—macaroni and cheese in a box.

Diane wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t talk, either. The rain was louder on the roof because of her silence. She went in the bedroom, shut the door, and ignored him. Walter passed the night on the couch, awake with his clothes on, while she snored on the other side of the wall in a way that, despite everything, was moving and endearing. Somebody that young and beautiful could snore and it was charming instead of obnoxious.

In the morning, before she woke, he sped into Friday Harbor. After scouring want ads in his idling Lincoln, he made a call from a booth and, following a cursory test drive, bought a seventy-five-dollar beater. It had buckled seat springs and smelled of mildew, but, leaving his own car behind, Walter drove it back to Cattle Point and, with false enthusiasm, urged Diane to learn to drive. “Come on,” he said. “This will be fun.” As if they could be jolly about an automobile, as if they were father and daughter. Diane got behind the wheel and immediately demonstrated her driving know-how. “None of your business,” she answered Walter when he asked her where and when she’d learned.

They went back for the Lincoln, then caravanned to a gas station, where Walter filled both tanks. He bought a quart of ice cream, a deck of cards, a book of crossword puzzles, and four bags of groceries. All of this went into Diane’s topped-off beater. No, she said, she didn’t need him to lead her back, because she knew “the way to jail.” What she did need was twice the cash he’d doled out earlier. Walter forked it over. He stressed that she should enjoy herself, use the car when she needed to, and wait things out. “Brilliant,” said Diane. “That’s just brilliant.”

One more time, Walter apologized, as if repeating himself would make things better instead of worse. “Look,” he said, “I take full responsibility for my part in this. I have a duty here, I know that, and I plan to see that duty through, no matter what.”

“Go home,” she answered. “And lay off the subject of what a good citizen you are, all right?”

On the ferry, his tail between his legs, Walter rubbed his receding hairline and stewed behind his steering wheel. On the mainland, he battled homeward in rain so harsh he worried that an accident, if it happened, would be his undoing. How was it, Lydia would want to know,

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29 that he’d had an accident north of home when the airport was south of it—the airport he’d supposedly made use of for his supposed trip to Houston? “Right,” thought Walter, “I’ve been in Houston,” and he stopped at Northgate Shopping Center to look for gifts that would seem like Texan gifts.

That night, sleepless, with Lydia beside him in a cotton nightgown and high-waisted panties, he lay in bed worrying about ways his plan could fall apart. What scared him the most was Diane’s clear ire and her potential for irrational behavior. She might go to a pay phone in Friday Harbor and call him at home, for instance, even though he’d asked her not to. This worried him so much that, in the morning, when the phone rang, he answered in a panic, sure it was Diane, but it wasn’t Diane, and all weekend it wasn’t Diane, and even though he still worried about a phone call incessantly, by Monday he’d succeeded in incorporating this worry into the larger, more generalized, apocalyptic worry he felt about the whole affair. How much more could he take?

On Monday, Walter contacted an obstetrician in Anacortes and an adoption agency in Bellingham about “a delicate situation involving our au pair.” On Wednesday, he took a day off from work and ran up to San Juan Island with flowers, doughnuts, magazines, and a used television set. As it turned out, there was reasonably good reception at Cattle Point.

To be polite, and to make it look as if he wasn’t in a hurry to catch a ferry home—to add a layer of reassurance for Diane that he was a good guy— Walter served Jiffy Pop and watched As the World Turns with her. “I’m in prison here,” Diane said. “There’s nothing to do. I don’t do a thing.”

“Take walks,” said Walter. “Get exercise.”

The next time Walter came to the island, it was to collect Diane for her appointment with the obstetrician. An hour on the water to pick her up at the cabin, an hour back to the mainland with a seething girl for company, thirty minutes with the doctor in Anacortes, a hot dog and ice cream devoured in a parking lot, and then yet again to the interminable ferry, again to Cattle Point, again getting Diane to her cloister, and then, for Walter, once more to the mainland, once more the long drive home.

The next week, he had to do it all over again for a trip to the adoption agency, so Diane could sign relinquishment papers and claim she didn’t know who the father was, even though the father—actually, Walter still wondered—was sitting right there, pretending to be helping. Walter felt

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grateful that the woman in charge of things pretended not to have seen this before—namely, the pregnant girl accompanied by an older man who purported himself as strictly a good Samaritan. But he didn’t feel grateful when she said that Diane would have to return the following week for an assessment of her features. This was so that the baby, when it came, could be placed in a family that had the right look, the better to allow for a successful sham, and to keep everyone not party to the deed— especially the baby, as it grew into a man or woman—from wondering what it meant that no one else in the family was, say, left-handed and cross-eyed. The next week came—another twice-circuitous journey. The assessment of Diane’s features was demeaning, and though she mechanically went along with the process, afterward she was livid about such a soulless inventory of her features. Walter worried that her goodwill was eroding further because she seemed brimming over now with shame and wrath. “Like meat,” she said. “It’s humiliating.”

She swelled prettily, though, as things progressed. They both went on lying to everybody involved in order to sustain the charade indefinitely, and in order to move forward without a hitch. Lydia, with her inner battery now fully recharged, took a wifely interest in what she called Walter’s “distance.” He told her that stress at work—preoccupation with “an upheaval” at Piersall-Crane (“Someone got canned, and somebody somewhere decided to dump his accounts on guess who?”)—was the cause of his absence from their family life. Then he played with the kids, to lend depth to his remorse. Meanwhile, Diane metamorphosed. Her teen-age pregnancy was charming, yes, but she looked blotchy and had a burgeoning double chin.

What to do? How to get to where this thing was done and he could move on with life unencumbered? And in the meantime, how to keep an angry fifteen-year-old on his side? Out of ideas, he bought her, once again, a double ice-cream cone in Anacortes, but it just made him all the sadder to watch Diane, so buffeted by circumstance, lick away earnestly at her Rocky Road. He said, “I know all of this is tough, but, believe me, I’m sticking with you, and we’ll get through it. These things happen.”

Diane sighed. “A baby,” she said. “And look what I’m doing.”

“I’m looking at it,” answered Walter, “and what I see is two people doing the best they can to do the right thing, Diane. We’re going to make sure our baby has a good home. We made a mistake—I made a mistake—

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31 but we’re owning up to it together, and so far, I’ve been proud to stand beside you while you stay the course with so much . . . is the right word ‘courage’? Look, I’m sure it isn’t easy to be alone on the island day in and day out, especially at your age, but we have to bear up, and we’re getting there.”

“It’s not just that it’s a baby,” Diane said, “it’s that it’s my baby, growing inside of me.” Then she cried while her Rocky Road ran down the cone onto her hand.

Walter convinced Diane to opt for an induced birth. She was to say that she lived on San Juan Island and was afraid of having her baby on the ferry, but the real reason, of course, was that an induced birth meant Walter could schedule.

One week before the day he’d marked on his calendar as travel to baltimore, they had to listen to a lecture from the adoption agency’s director. By law, Diane would have forty-eight hours following the birth of the baby to change her mind. After that, there would be a third day for the baby in the maternity ward, to make sure it was healthy. If there was anything wrong, if the baby didn’t meet certain standards, the new family wouldn’t come for it, as stipulated in their adoption papers. If nothing was wrong, as everyone expected, then, on the fourth day, the new family would take the baby without seeing Diane, or Diane’s seeing them.

Thereafter—out of this the director made a full-blown disquisition— Diane should think of herself as having done the right thing, as having provided love and a good life for her child by relinquishing it to adoptive parents, who subsequently would in fact be the sole parents in all legal regards. Was that understood? Did Diane know what she was doing? Did she get the nuances, the legal principles, the injunctions? Odds were that she did, thought Walter, because it had all been plodded through with Biblical depth and thoroughness. There it all was, a lot of spelled-out mumbo-jumbo, no doubt arrived at by lawyers and politicians and, he hoped, irrelevant in his case. Let the counted-on scenario begin, he thought, with no “if ”s intruding.

The appointed day arrived. For the trip to the mainland hospital, they took two cars, Diane in her beater without a license or insurance, and Walter in his workhorse Lincoln-cum-taxi, so that afterward they could

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go separate ways. But not really separate ways, because Walter would remain tethered to Diane to the tune of—she’d made clear what she wanted—one hundred fifty a month. How would he swing that? It was a question for later. A big one—but later. For now, on the ferry, they sat in his car together, Diane with her hands supporting her belly, Walter in the driver’s seat with his fingers twined behind his head, feeling, for the first time, that this episode might indeed draw to a close without ripping him apart. Maybe he would get away scot-free. Maybe, soon, the danger would pass. “Hey,” he said, “how are you doing over there on the passenger side, Diane?”

“Scared.”

Walter nodded as if he understood. “That’s got to be normal. On the other hand, the odds of complications during childbirth that doctors can’t handle are extremely low these days. What else?”

“Odds,” sneered Diane. “Don’t be so stupid. I’m not worried about the odds on what’s happening today. I’m worried about the odds for tomorrow.”

“I know,” answered Walter. “I know, I know. But I think it’s good for us to take this one day at a time. Right now’s not the moment to plan your whole life. Let’s think about what’s on our plate today, and we’ll think about tomorrow tomorrow.”

Diane said, “Easy for you to say. Tomorrow you go back to your cute children, your wonderful wife, your summer cottage, your car, your house, your wage packet—all of that, Walter. It’s no wonder you’re not thinking about tomorrow. You know precisely what tomorrow looks like.”

“That’s true,” he countered. “Whereas you, young lady, when this unpleasantness is done, will be young and beautiful and have your whole life in front of you, an open book, a wonderful adventure, while I’m watching Ozzie and Harriet.”

At the hospital, the obstetrician delivered a last-minute bad surprise: induction could take “several days.” This made Walter’s anxiety skyrocket, because his lies were good for a limited duration. He’d counted on the baby appearing on day one, then disappearing—on schedule— ninety-six hours later, but now, if he had to factor in several days prior to the birth for labor induction—well, he couldn’t factor that in. His whole ruse, at the last minute, would topple, or unravel. “What about a Csection?” he asked.

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33 It turned out that this was not his decision. He was banished to the waiting room to hope for the best, and to sit with another prospective father—twenty-five and balding—to whom Walter explained, when asked, what an actuary does, before both of them descended into nervous brooding. After four hours, to his relief, an intern came to tell him that labor was under way. Five hours after that, around 7 p.m., Diane gave birth to an eight-plus-pound boy, who, the obstetrician came to tell Walter, squalled loudly, with healthy lungs. When Walter first saw him, through glass, held closely to the pane by a maternity nurse, he noticed that his son wore a beaded bracelet identifying him as “Baby Doe.” Baby Doe, decided Walter, looked like his grandfather—like Walter’s father— who lived in Cincinnati with his third wife. He looked sturdy, healthy, strong-boned, and handsome, like most of the Cousins men, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. “Wow,” thought Walter, “that’s my son,” and for a moment he regretted that, as of three days hence, he’d never see him again. That was upsetting. That hurt a little. Another atrocious outcome of this swamp-march.

From a hospital pay phone—from “Baltimore,” this time—he called Lydia. “Up late,” he said. “Long day here. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends.”

“At a conference?”

“I hate conferences.”

“What’s keeping you up so late at a conference?”

“I have to hunker down and prep for meetings. Otherwise, I’m not prepared, darling.”

Then it was time for a visit with Diane, who was sitting up in bed in a blue hospital gown, a little peaked, with gray lips, greasy hair, and the amorphous torso of a completed pregnancy. “Diane,” he said cheerfully, “you’re looking good.”

“How’s he doing?”

“I was just there, checking. He’s a handsome kid. I got kind of caught up in looking at him and had to make myself stop staring at the little guy.

It was emotional, Diane. Pretty painful.”

“I’m not asking about you, Walter. I’m asking about him.”

“Not a peep,” answered Walter. “Right now he looks happy. And how are you? Are you doing all right? Is everything looking like it should?”

“Just terrific,” she answered.

The sarcasm worried him, and his worry deepened when she crossed

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her thin arms—one with its hospital ID band askew—and shook her head as though her disgust with everything, but mainly him, was total.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, once again. “It’s sad for me, too. It’s really, really sad, actually.”

Diane’s sigh, on hearing this, was of the never-ending variety, and left him feeling, on top of worried, blue. Blue because this had to be the darkest day of her young life, and that he had a role in it—the main role, in fact—made him feel so sick about himself his eyes filmed. “Stop blubbering,” Diane said. “There’s still, you know, the forty-eight hours. The two days I have to change my mind.”

Walter’s stomach clenched. “I don’t know,” he said, in a panic. “I don’t think you can change your mind at this point. I’m not too sure about that.”

Diane pulled up her knees and hung on to them. “Of course I can,” she said. “Forty-eight hours. There is a law that says I have forty-eight hours.”

“True,” said Walter, “but that’s just because people get emotional.

They see the baby and they get emotional and then they lose objectivity, Diane, they get all embroiled and they can’t see straight, and for women—this is true—their hormones get stirred up. It’s just not a good time for anyone to be making a decision about anything, it’s really not.”

“It’s actually vice versa, Walter. You don’t know what you really want until your emotions come into play.”

This didn’t sound too teen-agerish to him—its maturity was curious, even startling—but was that important right now? The whole thing just couldn’t disintegrate like this, not when he was so close to slipping out of it. “Diane,” he said, “come on, please. There’s a family out there expecting a baby. There’s more than just yourself to think about.”

“That’s ironic,” Diane pointed out. “You telling me there’s more than just myself to think about.”

“Listen,” said Walter, “I’m not a bad guy. I understand what you’re saying about emotions. Your point of view is completely valid, but this just isn’t the time.”

“It is precisely the time,” Diane countered. “It’s the forty-eight hours I’ve been allotted to reconsider. Walter, if you were named as the father— yes?—then you might call this a discussion between two people who both have a hand in a decision. But—Walter—you are not named. You

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35 might be the father, but you are not named. If you were named, then the two of us might be deciding this together, but you’re not, so just stay out of it. I mean it.”

“I’m not Norwegian, but Lydia is,” said Walter, “and this is a really good time to say uff da.” With that he fell, hard, into a chair.

“Lydia who?” asked Diane.

Now what? A counselor? Someone from the adoption agency? More money? All of those were bad ideas.

Walter repaired to the hospital cafeteria, intending to see if a late burger and fries would help him think about what came next. But when his burger was gone, there was still no solution, so he returned to the buffet line for butterscotch pudding, and, while eating it, made a list of options under the headings “pro” and “con.” Should he go back and argue? Try to reason with Diane? Remind her of her dream to go to college someday, which probably wouldn’t happen if she kept the baby?

Should he offer something? Ask what she wanted? Ask her, flat out, what it would take, in cash, to get her to keep to their plan? How about pushing the morality angle? He could already hear himself, he practiced a little: You’re giving the child a better life. Nope. When you promise someone something, make an agreement with people, you have a moral obligation to keep to your word—but no, that wouldn’t wash, either.

This Diane Burroughs was a tough little bird, but he’d known that from the first—ever since they’d played Life together. Clever and immune to manipulation. Always watching, thinking, weighing. What would she respond to when push came to shove, this girl who hailed from a gritty slice of England? He didn’t have a clue. He couldn’t tell.

Feeling hopeless, but armed with peanut-butter cookies, he returned to Maternity to plead his case. What Diane really liked were snickerdoodles, soft in the middle and doused heavily with cinnamon, but there were none of those, not even approximations, so peanut-butter cookies would have to do, delivered by a supplicant named Walter. “Eat one,” he said. “They’re not snickerdoodles, but they’re good.” Diane, in answer, glared, shook her head, and then, with clear disgust, said, “Please, Walter.”

He retreated to a chair underneath her room’s mounted television.

Diane had been watching a serial drama he wasn’t familiar with—about

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rich people and their alluring money—with curious avidity, he thought, given the pressing real-life matters at hand. How could she do that? He could never do that. “There’s something,” he said, getting up to take a cookie, “that I want you to have a little think about.”

“And what might that be?” asked Diane.

“Just this,” said Walter. “Try doing this. Try seeing yourself, I don’t know, a year from now, then three, five, ten years out. Try asking yourself what things might look like.”

“What for?”

“It’s a good exercise. I do it all the time. Humor me, Diane. Bear with me.”

Diane shrugged her wonderful, girlish shoulders. “Ten years,” said Walter, “snap, like that. And now you’re twenty-six—okay?—with a tenyear-old kid in your life.”

“Is your point that you know how to add up, Walter?”

Walter threw up his hands, one of which had a cookie in it. “Is that what you want when you’re twenty-six? I’m thirty-four, and I can tell you, you don’t. What you want to do—what you tell me you want to do—is attend a good American college and really make something of your life.”

“That would be good, but—” “Listen,” said Walter. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t decide anything at the moment, okay? Just do that, please. For your own good, Diane. Rest, watch TV, get a good night’s sleep, then let’s get together and have a talk about your future. A really good talk, you and me.”

She didn’t reply. She didn’t even look at him. “Diane,” he said, “you have to believe me when I say to you that, whatever you decide, you can count on my support. If it’s college, I’ll help. If it’s not, I’ll help, too. I’m not going to shirk my duties, believe that. I only want beautiful things for you.”

And how did she react to this? To this fresh reinforcement of his genuine sincerity? To his grasping, once again, at the straw of his own decency? She reacted by saying, “Not again, Walter. Please, not again.

Please don’t feed me that stale line.”

The next day, to his overwhelming relief, Diane decided to stay the course. Who knew why? It didn’t matter why. Baby Doe, without a doubt,

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37 was going to be adopted, and he, Walter, was going to go home, like a sailor who’d been on a long sea voyage that included sharks, scurvy, pirates, a typhoon, and a broken mast en route.

“Diane,” he said, “I think you’re doing the right thing in a situation where, really, there’s no right thing, only lesser evils and greater evils, and that’s the problem with life, for me—it doesn’t always go the way I think it should, it’s not always under my control.”

He thought he was speaking to her from the same corner of the ring, or from a page they shared, but Diane held her gut as if sickened by his observations and said, “I don’t need a lecture, Walter.”

“Okay.”

“Your problem with life—it’ll have to wait.”

“I see that.”

“I’m incapable of talking about your problems right now.”

“Let’s not talk about them.”

“The deal is, Walter, you’re the definition of a wanker. You need to understand this: you are a wanker. Wanker, okay? What’s the American?

Just look it up. Wanker.”

“I’ll look it up,” he said gruffly, and left.

Exhausted, he called Lydia from “Baltimore.” “I’m worn out,” he said, “and looking forward to getting home. I’m really, really looking forward to getting home.”

But he couldn’t go home. Not quite yet. There was one more night of this mire to be endured, and of watching motel television with a headache. He felt buoyed, though, because the whole thing was nearly over—all of it except for the blackmail part, the paying-through-theteeth part, the arm-and-the-leg part that there was nothing to be done about. But the dangerous part, the heart-soul-and-life-rending part, Walter believed that was done.

That night, Walter dreamed. He dreamed he was standing in the Newborn Viewing Area watching Baby Doe through glass. Then a nurse appeared, plucked up Baby Doe, brought him to the window, and displayed him for Walter’s benefit. “The logical thing would be to kill him now,” she said through the pane.

In the morning, Walter mulled this while he shaved. “Interesting,” he thought, “but dreams aren’t valid. They have no legitimacy. They’re just strangeness while you sleep. A dream is just your brain with its signals

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crossed. Oh well, so there you have it. Another weird dream. It’s meaningless.”

Walter checked out and returned to Maternity, where Diane and Baby Doe, he found, were gone. They’d left the hospital—but that couldn’t be.

What was she thinking? What was going on? “Oh no, no, no,” thought Walter, and called the adoption agency. He was put on hold twice, passed along twice, until the director informed him that she knew already. She’d gotten in touch with the prospective adoptive family, and the prospective adoptive family was opting out for reasons it wasn’t obligated to divulge, but also didn’t mind, in these circumstances, divulging—namely, that the birth mother had had a change of heart, and they didn’t want a birth mother who couldn’t let go, and also, what about the birth mother’s state of mind right now, how was she treating the baby? There were too many danger signals.

The beater car was gone from the hospital parking lot. It was the middle of April—a chilly wind, stirred pollens. Walter scratched his head and weighed his choices. He could just go home and take what fate dealt him, or not go home, never go home, or— “Wait,” he thought. “What am I doing? How many times am I going to do this? What have I gotten from evaluating options? Look where it’s gotten me—to this, right now. God, what a misery it’s been, and what a breath of fresh air it would be if somehow, some way, I could just live again, free of all these problems.”

He sat in his car feeling cheated by Diane, and banging his hand against the steering wheel. “I navigated so carefully through everything,” he thought. “I did everything right. I did everything I could. And look at me now, I’m sitting here like an idiot. And now I’m thinking about sitting here like an idiot. And I don’t have a reason to start my car. What would I do? Where would I go?”

Diane, he remembered then, had only a little money—whatever she’d saved from the cash he’d bled. It couldn’t be much. Maybe enough for a few motel nights, but then what? She didn’t have an income. She had a new baby, and—she had Walter over a barrel. “That’s the key,” he thought. “That’s the main thing. She has me on the hook for three hundred a month. Why would she run away from that? She wouldn’t run away from that. No way is she running away from that. Why didn’t I think of this? If I just sit back, I’ll hear from the little minx—she’ll call me at the office and soak me good.” In fact, he saw, she would soak him good

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39 indefinitely, milk him for whatever she thought he was worth. He was going to be paying through his teeth for a long time, that was just the way it turned out.

Walter drove to the final station in his journey: the Northgate Shopping Center, for gifts. For Lydia, Chanel No. 5; for Barry, the Lego Town Plan Set; and for Tina, the Happy Hippo, with a movable mouth and springy tail. Wonder of wonders, he felt buoyant walking the mall, amazed by Planet Earth and its intricacies, and by the singularity in all that had happened, and that night, at home, in bed with Lydia, he performed adequately, maybe even better. Afterward he even felt ready to turn over a new leaf, and prepared to live with himself.

As he’d predicted, Diane called him Monday morning at PiersallCrane. In a disembodied voice, as though reading from a script, she gave him instructions the way a kidnapper would give instructions: how much money she wanted—250 now, monthly, because of the kid—the date each month she wanted it, the post-office box in Portland where he had to send it, what would happen if he tried to play games or manipulate things or send money late or not send enough money or claim that this or that, an emergency or something, had gotten in the way of sending it even once. “You’re being blackmailed,” Diane advised him sternly.

“If you don’t follow through or hold up your end, all right, then, I’ll pick up the phone and—what’s her name again?—that’s right, Lydia. I’ll call Lydia. Lydia, you wanker. And no more apologizing,” said Diane, “because I’ve had enough of your apologizing.”

“I’ve got it,” said Walter. “But just one thing. Two hundred fifty a month? That sounds like a heck of a lot of money, maybe more than—” “Listen,” she hissed. “I didn’t call to negotiate—that’s not what’s going on here. Do you think I’m one of your stupid clients? This is the girl you got up the duff, Walter, this is me, Diane Burroughs, calling on behalf of your illegitimate son. This is about your son, you bloody arse, and what I want is more than reasonable when you think of it in terms of child support.”

He couldn’t argue and didn’t argue. It wasn’t his show: he could see that. So instead he said—after peeking into empty adjoining cubicles— that he only wanted the best for her, that he had never wanted anything but the best for her, and that, no matter what, he would always do his part. In short, he fed Diane the same lines he’d fed her for months, which,

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it turned out, had gotten him exactly nowhere. “Shut up,” said Diane, “and send the money.”

After putting down the receiver, Walter shook his head for a long time. “I’m an idiot,” he thought. “What just happened? And the whole time I thought I was smarter than her! Come on, Walter, clean up your act. Get a grip, buddy. Grow up—it’s time. You’re lucky this mistake didn’t blow up in your face. Lucky to get out of it alive.”

By the acclaimed author of the multi-million copy bestseller

SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS

3 rd OCTOBER 2011

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b y t h e s a m e au t h o r

Snow Falling on Cedars East of the Mountains Our Lady of the Forest The Other The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

UK prelims and endmatter corrections 22/08/2011 16:39 Page ii

First published in Great Britain 2011 Copyright © 2011 by David Guterson The moral right of the author has been asserted Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc.: Excerpt from “Do You Remember Walter?” words and music by Raymond Douglas Davies, copyright © 1969, copyright reserved by Davray Music Ltd. and ABKCO Music Inc., 85 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003. All rights on behalf of Davray Music Ltd. administered by Unichappell Music Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc. Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “Killer Queen”, words and music by Freddie Mercury, copyright © 1974, copyright renewed 2002 by Queen Music Ltd. All rights for the United States and Canada controlled and administered by Glenwood Music Corp. All rights for the world excluding the United States and Canada controlled and administered by EMI Music Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, place and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

The mathematical problems referred to in Chapter 6 have been culled from Gordon Raisbeck’s Information Theory and from David Harel’s Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing.

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4088 0747 7 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

www.bloomsbury.com/davidguterson